University presses seem to be jumping on the bandwagon, and some now produce trailers for their “cross-over” books. For Ruth Behar’s latest book, Traveling Heavy: A Memoir Between Journeys, Duke University Press released a short trailer featuring the author as she prepares for a trip. For her monograph, We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program, author Bernadette Atuahene gives a passionate two-minute overview of her argument. Princeton University Press produced a dramatic one-minute trailer for Adrienne Mayor’s book, The Amazons, and a thoughtful two-minute synopsis featuring sociologist Amin Ghaziani discussing his book, There Goes the Gayborhood?.

Harvard University Press’s trailer for The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, has almost 7,500 views, and Yale University Press has an entire YouTube channel called “Book Trailers.” The University of California Press promotes its book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, through a video that makes use of the author’s charming illustrations. Cambridge University Press even has a short trailer promoting itself, apparently to convince aspiring academic authors to consider CUP for their next book project.

Obviously, book trailers make more sense for books that might find an audience beyond the tight circle of the author’s disciplinary peers, but even so, my initial reaction to the academic book trailer phenomenon was that it might contribute to the McDonaldization of scholarship. Intellectual work becomes trivialized if reduced to a soundbite.

A friend recommended that I watch this short video of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson discussing the “Anatomy of a Soundbite,” and after some consideration, I wondered if perhaps the academic book trailer could serve as a kind of multimedia abstract. After all, every book, no matter how voluminous and complex, gets reduced to a three-to four-hundred-word blurb on its own back cover. We all write short paragraphs summarizing the findings of our articles, and even edited volumes with multiple authors require short promotional descriptions.

Reluctantly, I took the plunge. For my latest book, my colleagues, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin at Carnivalesque Films, generously agreed to put together a short trailer using some of my historical images. The Left Side of History is a somber book about leftist ideologies, World War II, and the Bulgarian Holocaust, and the video had to distill a complicated historical argument into three minutes. They did a beautiful job, but I still felt nervous and uncomfortable about the whole book trailer genre. It just didn’t feel like the kind of thing a serious academic book should have.

I was therefore quite stunned yesterday morning when Shelf Awareness, an electronic newsletter that reaches about 33,000 professionals in the book industry (publishers, editors, librarians, booksellers, etc.) featured David and Ashley’s video as their “Book Trailer of the Day.” While it’s wonderful to know that people outside of academia might be compelled to read the book, I fear that my scholarly peers will be more inclined to ignore it.

So Savage Minds readers, what do you think of the academic book trailer? Are these trailers a harmless by-product of our Internet age or do they contribute to the increasing trivialization of scholarly research? Please weigh in.